Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 01:47:45 -0500 (EST)
From: "Mario A. Caro" <ario-AT-uhura.cc.rochester.edu>
Subject: 2 Calls for Papers for Benjamin Conference


Please note that what follows are two separate calls for papers: one for the
"Passagen 2000" Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) workshop and the
other for the International Walter Benjamin Association Conference. The
former is being held in conjunction with the latter.

=============================================================================PASSAGEN 2000: THE CITY, PACE AND SPACE
ASCA Workshop July 21-23, 1997
Call for participation - Deadline March 1st, 1997
Contact: ASCA-AT-let.uva.nl

Walter Benjamin's historical notes on 19th century Paris, known as the
unfinished Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project, were many things at once: a
history of Paris, of philosophy of seeing, an experience of city life, and
a practice - unfinished because unfinishable - of history writing. The
project was meant to free the present from myth by means of a historical
knowledge that lies, as Susan Buck-Morss phrased it, forgotten, buried,
within surviving culture.(1)
     Benjamin's Passagen-Werk offers an attempt to rethink the aims and
methodologies of history, with an emphasis on history's relevance for the
present. But the history it writes - or could not write - is that of
material objects, of city life, of visual culture, as perhaps the most
symptomatic "way of life" in the present. For ASCA, focused as it is on the
present and on a reconsideration of canonicity, this work constitutes a
great resource and challenge, source of inspiration and measure of
difference. If Benjamin wrote his notes toward a history of Paris as in
some essential way "nineteenth-century", what can we learn from this
project for an assessment of city culture near the end of the millennium?
     If anything, Benjamin's work is interdisciplinary, or rather, does not
accept disciplinary confinement in any sense at all. It offers insights,
ideas, knowledge, for all those interesting issues of cultural analysis,
whatever their own disciplinary background, and at the same time
constitutes a challenge to everything we have been taught to hold dear by
way of methodology. It demonstrates the importance of attention to the
experience of being "inside" the object of analysis; of looking around and
seeing anew all those images and objects that were always-already there; of
mass culture and a cultural pedagogy based on an acknowledgment of its
importance. The flaneur, the journalist, the cab driver, the shopkeeper and
the shopper are the main characters in a truly cultural vision of the city.
     By way of a prelude to the international conference on the legacy of
Walter Benjamin, held in Amsterdam from July 24th through 26th 1997 and
co-sponsored by ASCA, this intensive workshop will be devoted to imagining
a Passagen-Werk for the year 2000. It will consist of three days - July
21st through 23th - of intensive debate around position papers which will
be distributed ahead of time. Papers can address issues of city culture in
the present in the broadest sense: from film, television and the new media
to issues of multicultural interaction, architecture and crowds, museums
and their contents, reading, time, space: everything one can bring to bear
on the cultural life of a city around the year 2000.
     The city today is most keenly distinguished from other environments by its
specific spatial organization and by the temporal constraints it poses.
Amsterdam during rush hour is one way of seeing how these two aspects are
connected. Do city people find time to read, and do crowded apartments
leave them space to do it? Is city space so hyper that the pace
automatically picks up?
     Whereas we do not encourage participants to imitate Benjamin's writing
format in this work, his ideas, however loosely construed, are to be
considered as a source of inspiration or a bone of contention. No thorough
knowledge of Benjamin's work is required; rather, we are hoping for an
imaginative engagement with the project he pursued as an entrance into the
question of what city life is now and is to be in the near future, how it
relates to the past, and how our academic disciplines help or don't help to
understand that life analytically.
     Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to the kind of overall cultural
vision that an object such as "the city" requires, is the detailed
engagement with that object or a section of it, that is still best
described as "close reading". A close reading, then, that - learning from
Benjamin's musings about Paris - is always entangled, and contending with,
a theoretical reflection that cannot master it. The explicit positioning of
the paper in terms of both object and theory as well as method, in terms of
the relationship between the present and the past as it is played out in
the lived environment of the city, will be an essential criterion for
selection.
     Participation is free and open to all ASCA members, PhD students of
affiliated institutions, and interested others. Reasonable housing
facilities can be arranged on a first come, first serve basis.
     Proposals (500 to 1000 words) are to be submitted before March 1st. If
accepted, finished papers must be in the ASCA office by May 30th. Papers
should not exceed 3500 words (ten pages) and should be submitted on disk or
e-mail.

(1) Susan Buck-Morss, 1989 The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and
the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press

===========================================================================
Walter Benjamin Conference 1997: Call for papers

The International Walter Benjamin Association will hold its Conference on
July 24-26, 1997 in cooperation with Felix Meritis, the Goethe Institute,
and ASCA. The theme of the conference is "Perception and Experience in
Modernity" and its structure will comprise plenary double lectures followed
by series of workshops. The subsections of the workshops are: Vision and
Multimediality;Politics of Image and Space; Figures of Experience 1,
Presence, Power, Performance; Figures of Experience 2, Allegory, Memory,
History.

Participants include: George Steiner, Werner Hamacher, Sigrid Weigel,
Martin Jay, Samuel Weber and many others.

If you are working on Walter Benjamin, you are invited to submit a precis
of a paper not longer than 300 words. Your final papers should not exceed
3000 words and will be circulated in advance to the other participants.
Abstracts should be sent to the International Walter Benjamin Association,
ALW, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, fax: +31
20 6206863 or 525 3052, e-mail: Benjamin-AT-let.uva.nl, tel. +31 20 6226762.